Another example could be Authy.
...currently out there in the beta update stream, shouldn't be far off now.
Too bad corporate interests are against openness. I really would have liked it if all services were interoperable with one another.
If I remember correctly, it did, and then they removed the feature.
They claim it was due to spam, but really, there are a number of ways to solve that problem without removing the feature entirely (ranging from better spam-prevention heuristics to requiring an explicit opt-in).
Hangouts is in all ways inferior to Google Talk. It's really a shame.
It received a lot of heavy duty criticism when initially launched because security was at the time its primary selling point. It looks like they've at least partially pivoted away from that and now are focusing on making what appears to be a smoother, faster Hangouts.
I use KTP for the hangouts chat part, and then my gmail tab rings when people call me on it. Its suboptimal, and a huge usability loss from 5 years ago when Google wasn't pushing proprietary bullshit but instead had jingle, but it at least barely works still.
on a side note i see several people say this but using a 2015 mbp I don't really see this battery draining behavior. Can anyone point to benchmarks or has anyone actually done a real test on this assumption ?
http://blog.getbatterybox.com/which-browser-is-the-most-ener...
>> TL;DR; If you’re a MacBook user, you’re losing an average of 1 hour of total battery life by using Chrome. Firefox is a little better, but Safari is the clear winner. You’ll want to use Safari if you want to get the most battery out of your laptop.
[0]: http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/10/8381447/chrome-macbook-bat...
I make no claim about it's veracity, just saw the headline recently - probably on HN.
Pidgin and Adium do not support (transferrable) chat history and do not show messages when I'm offline, which is a huge usability hit. Especially when people talking on the other side expect that the messages are visible to you even if you're not immediately online.
This times a million. GChat (now "hangouts"), though their XMPP interface, attempts to send new messages only to the "active" client, which means that if you try to use Pidgin or Adium (I used both myself for a number of years; they're fantastic applications) or any other XMPP client, you'll lose messages in Adium/Pidgin for a few minutes whenever you move the mouse cursor in gmail or peek at messages in the hangouts phone app. You'll never see those messages in Adium/Pidgin, and there's no way (afaik) to tell that you're not getting messages, either; it's like they don't exist.
Google, however, sends all the messages to its own clients; you never miss messages there. And so, to me, this smells like a clever (and intentional) strategy to cripple third-party clients.
They miss notifications and occasionally messages on their own clients too, but I guess it isn't as consistently repeatable.
I did see a reverse-engineered Hangouts client at some point; does anyone know if this works well enough?